Cross Timbers Middle School

GCISD middle and high school students had an opportunity to learn about artificial intelligence (AI) and participate in hands-on lessons, thanks to a week-long AI Camp offered June 5-9 by the district’s Technology Services Department in partnership with the University of Texas at Dallas.

“I feel like before [the AI camp] it was mostly what we have in our own life, like Alexa and some things like that, but now I can see how those things are made and the purpose of them,” said Riya Sajan, who will be a sophomore at Grapevine High School this coming school year.

The camp used a curriculum offered by the Mark Cuban Foundation.

The first day of the camp they learned about what AI is, which GHS incoming ninth grader Natalia Shevchuk could explain very simply.

“An AI program is something that takes information that you give it and then based on the program rules that the website or other system creates an output for you to use or put into something else,” she said.

One of the first activities was to enter simple data sets, and Sajan and Shevchuk teamed up to see if the AI could guess Taylor Swift and Harry Styles songs with accuracy.

“Sometimes it was accurate and sometimes it wasn’t,” Shevchuk stated. “This one time we put in a Taylor Swift song and the machine said it thought it was a Harry Styles song with 86 percent confidence. It was still fun to do and learn about it.”

On another day, students created their own chatbots to be used for a fictional pizza company website, and other days they learned about voice and facial recognition; natural language processing; and math calculations used by machines to make predictions. The students also learned that as good as machines are, context matters, which was illustrated using as an example that the sentence “Luka Doncic (basketball player) was on fire last night” could have two different meanings.

At the end of the week, students agreed that the AI camp was worth attending.

“We pretty much learned the foundations and everything we would need to know if we wanted to go take a class,” Sajan stated, while Shevchuk added that “I learned that AI is used a lot more in the real world than we realize and we can use it to assist us in a lot of different daily things that we do.”

To see and learn more about the AI camp, view the NBC 5 news and CBS News Texas coverage.